Can you be a software craftsman and not test? Scott Nimrod says no! Carl and Richard chat with Scott about his experiences using TDD practices to build software and how that affected his approach to craftsmanship. Scott talks about h.ow writing testing code to quickly test your app code is a far more efficient use of time compared to repeatedly compiling and running an application, then manually navigating to the feature in question and playing with it. Proper tests are faster, more accurate and repeatable, resulting in better code. And they’re even more important when the app gets bigger, the number of developers increase and time passes – build your software right!

I had gone through a lot of days of futzing to make this work and thought others may benefit from this as well. Instructions are included for both VS2010 (at the very end) and VS2015.

VS2015

VS2015 is much easier than VS2010, as both the Entity Model and the DBContext generator (pick either version 5 or 6, depending on your needs), as they are right in Add New Item’s dialog box under “Data” subsection.

Project settings modifications

Your DAL project will need to have the app.config set to Your unit test project then needs 2 things:

Adding a Reference to EntityFramework.dll in the Data Test project, to match the same EF reference item from your Data project.

And a post build step to bring in the config, otherwise your EF Integration tests will fail saying it can’t find the connection. Exact command that I’d used is not a perfect outcome compared to a file move, as this does a copy:

copy App.Config $(TargetName).config.

VS2010

If in VS2010, first add a ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
Then search for “Entity” and add the Nuget Package for EntityFramework 6.x. Note, you won’t be able to use the designer though, so I’d highly recommend getting VS2012 or higher.

Hi all. I hope everyone is making their day great. I had a scenario where the Watch value of an expression was valuable to see during the recursion of a function. I had a recursive SolveSolution function and it worked with continuously getting the next empty cell and plugging in a trial value in that to see if it was a legal move.

The Parallel Watch window is a great tool in this manner. You can add several watches and they each go in as a column value. Here’s a screenshot to follow along into the recursive method. Take note of the Recursion Depth value as well.

Using the output of this tool, the application bug that I’d remaining was a lot easier to resolve and resulted in a quicker resolution. Hope this helps!